A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (30 page)

Phocaean, not Phoenician, Massilia (Marseilles) was an important import-export centre, and, after all, it was the people of Massilia who invited the Romans into Provence in
181
BC
, providing a jumping-off-point for the entire country. Each manufacturing port had its secret recipe, and so popular was garum that the sauce was factory-produced.
Pompeii, Leptis Magna and Antipolis (Antibes) were famous for a mean garum, but Bithynia on the coast of the Black Sea seems to have been
the
one. The Carthage and Cadiz brands were highly
esteemed. The grandest was ‘garum sociorum’, ‘garum of the allies’, perhaps so-called because the decomposing mackerel, anchovy or (rarely) red mullet and shrimp intestines
were in fact self-digesting due to the action of the fish’s own intestinal microbes.

A recipe from Apicius:

When the mixture had completely decomposed, carefully calculated amounts of concentrated decoctions of herbs were added; then, a fine strainer was plunged into the vessel to collect the syrupy,
pale yellow, pungent, salty, fishy and, most distinctively, cheesy liquid. This was then left to mature. The residue or
alec
, something akin to
marc,
the residue of pressed grapes,
was not thrown away but kept for the poor people
to season their bland porridges; just as the most intense sauces in the world’s repetoire – the soys of China, the
curries of India and the chilli mixtures of South America – are designed, fundamentally, to perk up piles of cheap and bulky carbohydrates which both dilute and absorb the sauce. It is,
however, hard to imagine what garum added to meaty dishes.

Some favoured ‘sanguine garum’ made of tuna blood – even stronger than the ordinary garum! The freshwater catfish found in marshes which weren’t much good for eating
(having thick skin and lots of bones) were pounded up and turned into a garum called
muria.
Garum diluted with water,
hydrogarum,
livened up the daily diet of the Roman soldier. Garum
diluted with wine would be used to make the famous Byzantine sauce ‘oenogarum’, and diluted with oil it became ‘oleogarum’, and with vinegar ‘oxygarum’. Today
the nearest we can get to garum is perhaps the ‘nuoc man’ of Vietnam, ‘tuk trey’ from Cambodia or ‘nam pla’ from Thailand, all made from putrefying fish and yet
there are no records of bacterial infection caused by eating any of these things. Indeed, Laotians put a few drops of ‘nuoc man’ into babies’ bottles. Garum made the fortunes of
the Greek and Roman trading posts and the Provençal
pissaladière
, the
pisara
of the Var and
pissala
of Nice – both fishy preserves – are its
great-grandchildren.

Its price was shattering – the price of caviare is nothing by comparison; the only possible parallel is the essences used in scent-making. In Caesar’s time a
congius
(about
three and a quarter litres) of garum cost 500
sesterces
, something like £4,000!

Silphium is a herb, completely unknown to us today, which was another essential in the Roman kitchen. A wild carrot is a theory. It came from the former Greek colony in Cyrene in North Africa,
where the economy revolved so entirely
around silphium and horses, and life was so narrow as a result, that Antiphanes the dramatist, in the fourth century, made one of his
characters moan, ‘I will not sail back to the place from which we were carried away, for I want to say goodbye to all – horses, silphium, chariots, silphium stalks, steeple-chasers,
silphium leaves, fevers, and silphium juice!’ Due to overcropping, silphium ran out in Nero’s time, so the Romans had to make do with asafoetida (Persian
asa,
mastic; Latin
foetida,
stinking). It’s the sap of a large, umbelliferous plant, extremely bitter, more pungent than garlic with a stench like carrion and, again, expensive. It was rubbed over plates
before the food was put on to make the food taste better, by comparison. This habit would indicate that a real problem faced by Roman cooks was the danger of rancidity, so they shrouded the basic
raw material in overpowering substances.

So expensive were silphium and asafoetida that Apicius suggests a way of making an ounce of silphium go further, by keeping it in a jar of pine nuts, which it impregnated like a vanilla pod
flavours sugar. So when a recipe needed silphium, a few pine nuts could be used. A drop of asafoetida greatly enhances fish dishes today but we don’t know how much the Romans used. Probably a
strong dose. Indians have always used asafoetida under the name of
hing
, and often in such quantities that supplies have to be imported from Afghanistan. The Romans also liked an Indian
plant called ‘nard’; it’s related to valerian and smells of decay. All these strange tastes seem to have one ‘quality’ in common; they all stink, are strong and
bitter, and preferably evoke a cheesy, decaying whiff.

What did the Romans drink? They didn’t like beer, they drank wine and preferred white wine, usually sweetened with
honey. Women were not allowed
wine, equated with blood, therefore suggesting figuratively adultery; wine was also thought to be an abortifacient, to bring on monsters; and as intoxication causes a form of delirium which may be
prophetic, better the women didn’t have the chance to be better informed. Further, the delirium of drunkenness denoted possession – divine rather than demoniac at this time – and
this possession denoted violation, and a violated woman could never be regarded as pure and chaste again. The Romans did not analyse the properties of alcohol and did not, knowingly, have spirits,
an Arab invention (
al-kuhl
, originally meaning a very fine powder of antimony – the kohl as in eye make-up – came by extension to mean any powder obtained by sublimation, i.e.,
the direct transformation of a solid into vapour, or the reverse). The rich and boozy saw nothing wrong with intoxication amongst the men and many a slave had to guide his master back from a
dinner, steering him from urinal to urinal. A host could also organize extra drinking by appointing as his assistant someone whose three names contained a certain number of letters. For instance,
the name Gaius Julius Caesar has seventeen letters, which meant drinking his health in seventeen cups of wine, and the capacity of a cup might be anything from one to eleven
cyathi
,
depending on the capacity of the
cyathus
, the ladle. Suetonius has it that the proverbial sobriety of Augustus allowed him only three cups of wine a meal, which would have meant some litre
and a half!

Not until 121
BC
did the Italian vineyards take off. Earlier texts speak mainly of Greek wines. So great was the demand for white, or rather, amber wine that red wine was
‘breached’ with sulphur. The Greeks blended their wines; the Romans did not but they did cook some of their wines and flavour them with aromatics – a sort of sweet Dubonnet. The
reduced cooked wines became
defrutum, carenum
and
sagra
– the latter being the thickest and stickiest and not greatly fermented, and all were sweetened
with honey.
Mulsum
was the sweetest of all, with a ratio of ten litres of honey to thirteen litres of wine. Apicius used all these reduced wines in his cooking, plus a raisin wine called
passum
made of grapes left to shrivel to half their size on the vine – presumably
passum
would have resembled sweet white dessert wines resulting from the noble rot, or
botrytis.

The wine from Alba was aged for fifteen years and from Surrentinum for twenty-five years and ended up, according to the Emperor Tiberius, as
generosum acetum
– vinegar, but
magnificent and well-sweetened vinegar! Trimalchio served a 100 year-old Falernian: a joke, but might suggest they had vintages. As well as the Italian wines the Romans drank wine from Greece, Asia
Minor, Egypt, Spain, Provence, Narbonne and Aquitaine. Petronius said that Rome had laid its hands on the world, and it also stored the world, so to speak in its cellars. In fact, the Romans stored
their wine at the top of the house near the smoking chimney; they liked this extra bouquet.

The barrel came from Gaul and was associated with beer, so the most common container for wine was the amphora, coated inside with pitch and sealed with clay. The glass bottle’s use spread
at the end of the first century
BC
and with it came the cork stopper.

The Romans proved as thorough in viticulture as in everything. They grafted – perhaps an Etruscan invention – dipping the pruning hook in bear’s blood and wiping it off with
beaver skin. No one knows where this ritual originated. From the second century
BC
onwards the Romans regulated the viticulture introduced into Mediterranean Gaul by the
Greeks and the Gauls provided the ingenuity and talent. For instance, the Gauls
went off into the forests to find wild vines which were then grafted on to
‘southern’ stock. Before long, the Gauls in the Allobrogica, now the Dauphiné, succeeded in hardening a vine which was frost-resistant. The cunning chieftains cashed in on their
discovery to get Roman citizenship. Why not? – it gave them the right to grow their own vines for themselves in the future. Following this example, the Bituriges Vivisci passim of Bordeaux
bred a vine which thrived on the gravelly, wind-swept soils of the Graves, Aquitaine and Médoc. As Tacitus put it,
‘Grave solum coelumque.’
(‘How gloomy is soil and
climate.’)

Funnily enough, there was during the Roman Empire a parallel situation to the EC wine gripes of today. The citizens of Rome who grew their wines in Italy and the province of Narbonne made it
known in high places that the talents of their Gaulish colleagues, especially the Allobroges and Bituriges, were damaging their own export trade and even home consumption. No wonder the less
well-off Romans wanted to buy Gaulish wines, which were reasonable, well made and plentiful.

With such a massive amount of documentation on the Romans, we just can’t be sure what their food and drink tasted like – very odd – but as the French essayist Suarès
says: ‘There is no heresy in a dead religion.’ Quite, but we do know that their religious fervour for ostentation, gluttony and ridiculous gastronomic acrobatics went so far that some
diners had to tickle their throats with a feather once or several times during the dinner so that: ‘
Vomunt ut edant, edunt ut voment’
, as Seneca disapprovingly put it.
(‘They vomit to eat and eat to vomit.’) But what a lot the Romans organized, discovered and adapted – imagine if they’d known about the Americas . . . tomatoes, chocolate,
maize, coffee, potatoes, the turkey . . . Help!

THE TRIVIAL ROUND AND
THE COMMON TASKS

In the
domus
of our friend, let us call him Quintus (as do his intimates), who lives on the Caelian Hill, opposite the Palatine, the bell rings just before dawn. His
acquaintance the polymath Pliny, would have been up hours ago, scribbling away – but then he even wrote in his sedan chair . . . Quintus’ first caller is his twelve-year-old son, just
off to school. He notices the old slave carrying a lantern and the boy’s books, probably Virgil or Horace. He kisses him, reminds him he has to recite a poem at the dinner party tonight, and
he sighs, for he knows the school is boring, that the lessons are repetitive, literally beaten into the boys, and wonders if he shouldn’t assemble a group of friends and fund a school with an
intelligent Greek as teacher, as had been done recently over on the Palatine and was constantly advocated by (again) Pliny. Trouble is, Quintus thought, we Romans are so suspicious of the Greeks,
giving the boys the wrong ideas . . .
‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,’
he muttered to himself – one of the few lines he remembered from the
Aeneid.
(‘I fear
the Greeks even though they bring gifts.’)